Posts Tagged ‘Jeremy Allen White’

SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE: 3 ½ STARS. “Bruce dances in the darkness.”

SYNOPSIS: An inside look at the creative process of an iconic performer, “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is an up-close-and-personal look at the making of his 1982 album “Nebraska,” a turning point in Bruce Springsteen’s career. “It’s like he’s channeling something deeply personal and dark,” says Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong).

CAST: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Odessa Young, Gaby Hoffmann, Marc Maron, David Krumholtz. Directed by Scott Cooper.

REVIEW: Compared to other rock bios “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is unlikely; as unlikely as Bruce Springsteen following up his biggest hit to date, the upbeat, jangly “Hungry Heart,” with the stark, downbeat “Nebraska.”

Set in the early eighties in the weeks and months after the close of the phenomenally success tour for “The River,” the film begins as a standard rock biography. Springsteen’s manager John Landau (Jeremy Strrong) is the buffer between a record company hungry for another record, preferably laden with big hits, and an artist (Jeremy Allen White) struggling to find himself in this wake of fame that came with his new, widespread success and the pressure to “hit it out of the park again.”

Springsteen’s journey “to find the real among the noise” leads him to a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey. Equipped with only a lo-fi Teac Tascam 144 four-track cassette recorder, he records the sparse demos inspired by the meditative crime drama “Badlands” intertwined with memories from his troubled childhood. The songs are stark, introspective and the polar opposite of what the record company is expecting.

“Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is a quiet, minor chord portrait of an artist at a crossroads. But what begins as a story of an artist struggling with the pressures of fame and a greedy record company soon turns to the fight for artistic integrity as depression and isolation take hold.

“I know who you are,” says a car salesman, recognizing the rock star. “That makes one of us,” Springsteen replies with a straight face.

Director Scott Cooper, who also wrote the script based on the 2023 book “Deliver Me from Nowhere” by Warren Zanes, avoids most, but not all, of the rock bio genre’s trappings to deliver a brooding character study of a man battling depression as he is cut loose from the world he came from and thrust into an uncertain future.

It sounds like a cliché, but Jeremy Allen White channels Springsteen. His singing voice doesn’t quite match the Boss’s power, but in the film’s contemplative moments, and there are many, White is not afraid to leave space around the performance. His take on Springsteen is a vibe, as reliant on the character’s unspoken moments as it is on what the character actually says.

The movie does rock out from time to time with some randomly inserted concert footage (While “Born in the U.S.A.” was written for the “Nebraska” album, the inclusion of the full-band rave-up here may please fans but feels out of place) but works best when it focusses on White’s stripped-down performance.

The film is really a solo act.

The singer’s relationships are given a short shrift. His courtship of Jersey girl Faye Romano (Odessa Young) is underwritten and, considering how large The E Street Band looms in Springsteen’s mythology, they are barely a presence here. It’s in his bond with longtime manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) and the complicated relationship with his father (Stephen Graham) that he shows the kind of emotional vulnerability that lies at the heart of the performance.

“Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is a solemn movie that drags in its latter section as Springsteen fights for the release of the starkly poetic “Nebraska.” The tortured artist’s insistence on musical integrity is commendable but feels repetitious by the film’s end.

Still, Cooper’s focus on the artist’s path, on resilience, on forgiveness and not simply Springsteen’s Wikipedia page, is admirable.

THE IRON CLAW: 3 ½ STARS. “somber movie that looks beyond the ring.”

Steeped in tragedy and trauma, “The Iron Claw,” a movie about the Von Erich wrestling family starring Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White, and now playing in theatres, isn’t a sports movie. Set against the backdrop of professional wrestling, the movie is study of toxic masculinity and how the sins of the father can be visited on their sons.

The film begins with Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany) patriarch of the championship Von Erich wrestling dynasty. Early in his career, in an attempt to create a villainous heel persona, he changed his name from Jack Adkisson to the German sounding Fritz Von Erich. The switch purposely stoked post-war animosity and made him a wrestler audiences loved to hate.

In the ring he was a relentless competitor, the purveyor of the deadly Iron Claw, his much-feared finishing move that squeezed his opponent’s face into mush. Outside the ring his drive to win saw him push his sons Kevin (Efron), Kerry (White), David (Harris Dickinson) and Mike (Stanley Simons), into the family business.

“Now, we all know Kerry’s my favourite, then Kev, then David, then Mike,” said Fritz. “But the rankings can always change.”

Under Fritz’s hardnosed guidance, the Von Erich’s became one of the first wrestling families to become popular, winning championship belts and fans for their high-flying, acrobatic style but their accomplishments are tempered by tragedy, which son Kevin blames on a curse brought on by the family’s adopted name.

“Ever since I was a child, people said my family was cursed,” Kevin said. “Mom tried to protect us with God. Dad tried to protect us with wrestling. He said if we were the toughest, the strongest, nothing could ever hurt us. I believed him. We all did.”

“The Iron Claw” is about sports, and clearly stars Efron and White spent time in the gym to prepare for their shirtless bouts in the ring, but like all good sports movies it isn’t about the sport. It’s about the universal subjects of tragedy, brotherhood, brawn and bullies. The backdrop may be unusual, but anyone who has ever been browbeaten by a bully will find notes that resonate in the Von Erich story.

At the heart of the film are Efron and White as sons Kevin and Kerry. Both hand in performances etched by their physicality but deepened by the emotional turmoil that envelopes each character.

Efron digs deep in a career best performance. As Kevin watches his family fall apart, he slips into a depression, afraid that the curse is real and may affect his own wife (Lily James) and kids. For such a physical film, it’s internal work that reveals a well of emotion and sublimated anger underneath the character’s bulky frame.

White has a showier role, but as Kerry, the son who pays a huge personal price for wanting to please his overbearing father at any cost, he is more outward in his reactions to the story’s twists, but the sadness he carries with him is palpable.

Maura Tierney does a lot with little as mother Doris Von Erich. A stoic figure, when her buried feelings threaten to overflow, the look on her face has such quiet intensity it speaks louder than words.

McCallany has a much larger role. He is the catalyst, the bully who pushed his sons toward the ring by any means necessary. He’s the movie’s obvious boogeyman. Trouble is, the family can’t see it until it is too late.

“The Iron Claw” is a slow moving, somber movie that looks beyond the ring to focus on the price this family paid for success.